Universität Augsburg

Germany

The Lab for Multimedia Concepts and its Applications at Augsburg University is part of the Institute for Computer Science and focuses on affective interfaces, multimedia communication, conversational agents, user modelling, and user motion tracking. To build interfaces that allow for more natural and enjoyable communication between humans and computers, researchers follow a highly interdisciplinary approach that involves not only computer scientists, but also designers, electrical-engineers and cognitive scientists. The Lab has an international profile, having organised a number of international events, such as the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments (IDS 2002), the Second Conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media (COSIGN 2002), and a Dagstuhl Workshop on Evaluating Conversational Agents which will take place in early 2004. Strong national and international co-operations with various industrial partners, such as Honda or Siemens AG, in the area of affective virtual characters enhance the competencies of the team.

Prof. Elisabeth André is a full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Augsburg, Germany and head of the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and its Applications. Prior to her appointment as a professor, she worked as a principal researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) where she has been leading various academic and industrial projects on intelligent user interfaces and affective virtual characters. Prof. André is Chair of the ACL Special Interest Group on Multimedia Language Processing (SIGMEDIA). Furthermore, she is on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence Communications (AICOM), Cognitive Processing (International Quarterly of Cognitive Science), Universal Access to the Information Society (UAIS). She is also the Area Editor for Intelligent User Interfaces of the Electronic Transactions of Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), and a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics for the period 2002-2004. She was the Programme Co-Chair of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents in Montreal in 2001 and the Programme Co-Chair of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Conference in Miami in 2003.

Dr. Martin Müller is a senior researcher at the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and Applications where his research focuses on machine learning in adaptive systems. Dr. Müller received his M.A. in Artificial Intelligence in 1995 with a thesis on order sorted inverted resolution from the University of Osnabrück. After a short research visit at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, NI, he worked in the AI group at the University of Bremen and the Institute of Semantic Information Processing/Cognitive Science in Osnabrück. In 2001, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on "Inducing Conceptual User Models". Dr. Müller has been the organizer of several national and international workshops in the field of machine learning and user modeling.

Dr. Jonghwa Kim is a senior researcher at the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and its Applications where he is conducting several projects on affective computing. His current focus of research lies on multichannel emotion recognition from speech, face and physiological signals. Dr. Kim received his B.S. and M.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering from Digital Signal Processing Lab of the Kyungwon University in Korea. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on "Lossless Wideband Audio Compression: Prediction and Transform" from the Technical University Berlin. He brings profound knowledge on multimedia signal processing including source coding, information theory, subband/wavelet transform, filter banks design, pattern recognition, neural networks and computer music.

Dr. Matthias Rehm is a senior researcher at the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and Applications where he focuses on embodied conversational agents and multimodal interaction. In 1998 he received his Diplom in Computer Science from Bielefeld University with a thesis on an reactive, incremental, and parallel language generation system. Dr. Rehm joined the graduate program Task-Oriented Communication at Bielefeld University in the same year. From 1998-2001 he was the representative of the graduate students. During this time he organized several international workshops on multimodal communication. In 2001, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on multimodal concept formation in situated agents.